Play shows wall full of emotions

CLEVELAND {AP} The lights go down at the Cleveland Play House and the actors on stage give life to the letters left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The first sniffle from the audience comes a few minutes later. Soon the crowd has created its own soundtrack to the action in front of them a soft chorus of muffled crying.

The show, "Touch the Names: Letters to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial," premiered on May 9 and runs through June 11. It is being praised by veterans who say it captures the emotions that the war evoked in them grief, guilt, loyalty and love.

The production actually commemorates all victims of the war not just veterans through the words of people who have visited the big, black wall in Washington with the names of about 58,000 dead inscribed on it.

Co-creators Randal Myler and Chic Street Man were working on another show in Washington four years ago when they got the idea for "Touch the Names."

The pair visited the Vietnam memorial on a day off. They were struck not only by the power of the memorial but by the way visitors responded to it and by the mementos they left behind.

They saw a potential theatrical piece in those objects: letters and cards, a baby's ultrasound, family photos, flowers, beers, booze, boots, medals, a varsity letter, a wedding ring.

Myler got permission from the National Park Service to visit the Lanham, Md., building where the thousands of objects are stored.

"It's an enormous warehouse and it's dead quiet," he said. "The most amazing feeling is the silence."

Myler copied as many letters as he could. Reading through them, he found "an overwhelming amount, not only of grief, but of love. It told me what the piece should be. It told me to keep it very, very simple and very direct and don't try to lay some editorial concept on it. Everyone's welcome at the wall."

Myler eventually whittled the production down to 58 letters, representing a startling range of viewpoints.

There are notes from mothers and girlfriends to the servicemen on the wall, and from comrades-in-arms now fighting to cope with postwar life (one veteran confesses he doesn't like to take his sons fishing; he sees blood on the boat deck).

There are other voices, too: the man who knew a soldier only because they played on opposing basketball teams (he leaves his varsity letter at the wall in tribute); military nurses haunted by the suffering they saw; soldiers making peace with the Viet Cong they killed; and the Vietnamese themselves.

There is even a voice from the wall itself, in the form of a letter an American soldier wrote home from Vietnam before he was killed. The letter offers guidance on how survivors should think about the soldiers.

"Take what they have left and what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own," the letter says. "And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call this war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind."

During the production, Street Man, the show's musical director, plays guitar on stage and sings gentle tunes that ease the audience through some wrenching moments. Even so, the show is draining at a relatively brief 75 minutes.

"When we first started doing it, people were walking out with tears in their eyes and I thought, 'I don't want do something that's going to upset people,"' he said. "But then I got to talking with people in the audience. They said, 'It's not pain it's a release for us.' So if it's healing, it's worth doing."